Tag Archives: WWII

Remembrance

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paratroopersIt was the Day of Days.

On the eve of the invasion, the Allied commander penned a letter in the event of defeat.  “The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do,” he wrote. “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”

Before dawn, 13,000 boys fell out of the sky into the hedgerows of Normandy.  My mother-in-law’s father was among them.  Don Bowman was a radio man in C Company, 501st Regiment, 101st Airborne.  Each by each, the boys flew off the stick into a hail of fire.  One out of five would die that day.  Bowman did not.

There was the Day of Days.

And then there were the days after.  

Bowman’s military records hint at his story.  That year the 101st fought their way across Europe.  Operation Market Garden.  The Ardenne.  Battle of the Bulge.  Liberation of Dachau.  Eagles Nest.  One Purple Heart. A Bronze Star for meritorious valor.

Bullet after bullet.

Medal after medal.

Body after body.

Until victory was had.

But even in victory, the price paid cannot be measured.  In 1969, estranged from his family, alone in Los Angeles, an alcoholic traumatized by war, Don Bowman  purchased himself a cemetery plot.

When asked to list friends or family, he wrote, “None.”

Those boys gave their lives to save Europe.  And now that confederation is being abandoned for want of leadership and the erosive force of nationalist and isolationist fervor.

On this day I think of Don Bowman.

I think that perhaps we owe him more than simple remembrance.

 

Asylum

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Rūta. Arija. Ieviņš.

That was my mother’s name.

As a 14 year old girl she travelled on foot the breadth of Europe fleeing the advancing Soviet troops. If she and her father and brother had not fled their native country, they would have died. Their knowledge of this fate was so certain that they eventually risked death to escape it. And for that, they journeyed on a hard, hard road.

My mother would spend her teen years in displaced persons camps in Germany. For five years she lived in detention. She did not have a country that she could go back to. And neither did she have a new one to which she could belong.

And she was abandoned in more ways than one. Her mother died during the war. In flight as a young girl, she was separated from her father for months at a time. These things took their toll. Later in life she would have a hard time forming attachments. She was prone to depression. As a grown woman, she would have difficulty sleeping. She would cry uncontrollably in the night. She was short of temper. In her bouts of sadness and rage, she could sometimes be violent.

But then again, perhaps she had it easy. In February 1945, as a young girl she joined hundreds of thousands of European refugees as they pressed toward the Elbe river. The Yalta Conference had just concluded, and by word of mouth, she learned where the borders would be drawn. Get across the Elbe, the people told one another. Across the Elbe you will be with the Americans.

My mother and brother were instructed to make peace with the American soldiers when they arrived. They were told to just surrender. If nothing else, at least you will get fed, people said. That was quite often the sentiment, my uncle once recalled. You will get fed and you will be taken care of.

Because the Americans don’t mistreat their prisoners.

They are not the Russians.

Rupmaize (the radio version)

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Thank you for the KQED listen.

Rupmaize

Bread, the very symbol of daily sustenance across time and cultures. And to Andrew Lewis and his World War II surviving family members a special bread has special meaning.

As a last act before a recent move, I baked two loaves of rupmaize.

It’s basically a Latvian rye bread – but it’s much more than that, partly because it’s much less. It’s essentially rye flour, water, a little yeast, and some sort of yogurt or kefir (call it turned milk). Mix it up, let the yeasts start to do their thing and then throw in a warm box (call it an oven) to arrest the action. You end up with these loaves that are some crazy cross between that hearty bread eaten by dwarves and that ethereal cake of which elves partake. It’s both sweet and sour. And it sustains.

During World War II, when Latvian families were loading up their wagons preparing for evacuation, no doubt women all over the countryside were hastily wrapping still warm rupmaize in cloth and packing it in baskets. It’s powerful stuff: One slice in the morning and you’re good until mid-day when a second slice keeps you going until afternoon. It can keep you fed when you may not have access to a kitchen for days or months on end.

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The year I lived in Cleveland with my aunt and uncle, my uncle would end the day with a slice of rupmaize and some tea. As part of his ornate ritual, he would fill a ceramic mug with deep black tea and would slowly lather a slice of rupmaize with butter and honey. This was his dessert. He was very particular in the details and I remember him once giggling as he explained them to me. But I was only twelve and I didn’t get it.

For my uncle, a survivor of war and tragedy, this was sacrament. Literally, give us this day our daily bread. As if to say, this stuff is the staff of life. We deserve no more, and just this is enough. A little bit will carry us in a time of need.

And we all have, in every moment, a time of need.

Rupmaize

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Recently as a last act before an upcoming move, I baked two loaves of rupmaize.

It’s basically a Latvian rye bread – but it’s much more than that, partly because it’s much less.

It’s essentially rye flour, water, a little yeast if you want, and some sort of yogurt or kefir (call it turned milk).  Mix it up, let the yeasts and bacterias start to do their thing and then throw in a warm box (i.e. oven) to arrest the action.

You end up with these loaves that are some crazy cross between that hearty bread eaten by dwarves and that ethereal cake of which elves partake.

It’s both sweet and sour.  And it sustains.  In 1944 when Latvian families were loading up their wagons preparing for evacuation, no doubt women all over the countryside were hastily wrapping still warm rupmaize in cloth and packing it in baskets.

It’s powerful stuff – one slice in the morning and you’re good until mid-day when a second slice keeps you going until afternoon repast.  It can keep you fed when you may not have access to a kitchen for days or months on end.

In the year I lived in Cleveland with my Uncle Eriks and Aunt Ingrid, I recall how many evenings after dinner, Eriks would end the day with a slice of rupmaize and some black tea.  I may entirely be making this up, but I remember this ritual where he would sit at the kitchen table and would fill a ceramic mug with deep black tea and he would lather a slice of rupmaize with butter and jam.

This was his dessert.

He was very particular in the details and I remember him once giggling as he explained them to us.

But I was only twelve and I didn’t get it then.

For my uncle, a survivor of war and tragedy, this was sacrament.  Literally, give us this day our daily bread.  As if to say, this stuff is the staff of life.  Just a little bit will carry us in a time of need.

And we all have, in every moment, a time of need.

So in this moment, on this morning, I think of my Aunt Ingrid who baked the bread. And my Uncle Eriks who so appreciated it.  And for both these things I thank them.

 

Anguish

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anguishA few days ago a friend asked if the ravens in my Facebook banner ( Albrecht Schenk’s painting ‘Anguish’ which now hangs in Melbourne) were “mean”, and generously offered that those black birds might work in solidarity with the lambs. I considered a quick reply, but held back. We know enough about ravens to know they beg no simple answers. And the seemingly simple question about ‘meanness’ is actually not so simple. It smacks a bit of “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” To which Dorothy frantically answers, “Why I’m no witch at all.”  She’s just Dorothy and she wants to go back to Kansas.

And then, of course, we are left with the not so small irony that for Dorothy to complete that journey back to the world of black and white, she must in turn become a slayer of very bad witches. Which of course makes her simultaneously both a bad witch as well as one who is good.

In the Middle Ages or perhaps even long before that, the raven was perceived as a portent of death, of imminent and profane destruction. When villagers would see a dark unkindness of ravens approaching on the horizon, they knew that the armies would soon follow. Ravens are omnivores, but most of all they are carrion birds. They dine on the dead. As well, they are sentient. They have sufficient cognition to recognize men bearing arms as armies. And that armies are for one thing: the making of death. The shedding of blood. The leavening of slaughter.

The Raven does not do the killing. But his arrival serves the advance warning. And then he bears witness. And here, at least in Schenk’s image, the unkindness evokes the sadness wedded to communion.

Whenever we eat, especially when we partake of bread and wine, we are taking the flesh and blood of the Host – of the sacrificial lamb – into our own bodies. In this act, we acknowledge our own complicity in his death, and the subsuming of his power, his humility, and his promise into our selves. In the Host’s death we find our own sanctification.

The raven was born to be a sentinel. And when there’s nothing left for which to be warned, the bird must fly so that it may dine on the burnt offerings. That is his task.

When I posted that banner image just after the election I actually wondered where in that picture I figured. And today I realize it is everywhere. I am at once the bleating ewe, the falling snow, the fallen lamb, and the raven in waiting.

Perhaps ask yourself where, if anywhere, do you find yourself in the image?

—

dine-on-fallenGermany, February 1945

After my family left Latvija in 1944, they walked across Poland and Germany a day at most ahead of the advancing Russian troops. They were accompanied by  family friends who in turn travelled with a wounded Russian soldier. His name is now lost, but the families valued him. Though disabled he had served as a kind of farmhand. He looked after the animals and he scavenged food and he did what he could to care for everyone. One day in Germany, under the Allied bombardment, he gathered potatoes that had fallen from train cars on the side of the tracks. He lost his footing and he fell down and was crushed by an oncoming locomotive. The train would have been bearing German soldiers, or food, or even the final bodies to be executed in Bergen Belsen.

In these days, especially in the smoke and mirrors and confusion of the last few weeks, it bears remembering that there can be a world in such chaos and moral ambiguity that one can be a victim even while dining on the fallen.

—
img_2809The German painter Gerhard Richter, born in 1932 on the eve of the burning of the Reichstag, would grow up in Dresden during the rise of National Socialism.  Distrusting the reality of received information, he would later say that “style is violence.”

What did he mean by this?  Style is ideology. And ideology, by definition, is visionary.  It is declarative and absolute. At an extreme, it depends on discounting or even silencing the opinion or worldview of others.

When we condemn entire classes of people with blanket words – terrorist, bad hombre, enemy of the people –  without any consideration for their discrete truths or histories and life stories, we deny the complexities of reality.  We deny fundamental humanity.

This is violence.

Authoritarian ideology frames the world in absolutes: A total disaster. A complete mess.  Police and society become militarized to ward off an impending and, more often then not, exaggerated or even fabricated danger.  The urban bourgeois become enemies.  People who are different, perhaps with darker skin or a foreign bearing, are framed as “an infestation.”

Mass spectacle replaces discourse and reasoned argument.

Authoritarian ideology begins by declaring outsiders or others as terrorists, foreigners, or criminal elements.  It leads to the infliction of suffering and, if left unchecked, unspeakable acts of violence.

img_2806This happens under a veil of social confusion, but also a tragic normalcy.  Heinrich Himmler himself, the architect of the Final Solution, actually considered himself to be a good father and a Good German.  He felt quite genuinely that he was restoring his culture by ridding it of an infestation, of other strange identities, of a decadent cancerous rot.

After the war, notions even as simple as “family” or “nation” or “good” become strangely indeterminate.  A fundamental distrust of the world and even language itself may be the hallmark of those whose understanding of reality has been shaped by authoritarianism.

What can we learn from the people who in other times fell inexorably under the sway of nationalist and exclusionary ideologies? Ideology and emotional or physical violence come at a cost. Who bears it and what does it look like?

We might turn to the enveloping canvasses of the German artist Anselm Kiefer, born a few months before VE Day and the close of the war. While Richter came to us during the convulsive birthing of Nazism, Kiefer’s infant eyes received it’s horrible conclusion.

To sit with Kiefer’s pieces is to be swallowed whole in the terror of the rounding up and of the rousing of the dogs of war.

Kiefer’s mucked and unruly residue is the inevitable outcome of the pattering martial tattoo.  It’s the consequence of a seething resentful voice that declares that he will do something to North Korea, to Mosul, to Syria.  The world exists as a being that has wronged him.  And for this, he will inflict violence and war. He will eradicate his enemies, however he defines them, from the face of this earth.

img_2829In the presence of Kiefer’s paintings you immerse yourself in the ashen remains that are left after the blistering attack.

Have no illusions as to what it looks like and what will follow. There is nothing pretty, nothing kind nor valorous, nothing redemptive about it.

It is straw caked in black tar.  It is burnt feces.  Fields after a dark harvest, barren of life and able to offer no feeding. It is a world set ablaze.

The fields harrowed in the winter by tanks are sown in the spring with blood. Horses we are. Gaunt frames.  Ribbed chests exposed. Grown from this ground, we dine on dirt and broken straw.

grane_by_anselm_kiefer-_woodcut_with_paint_and_collage_on_paper_mounted_on_linin_museum_of_modern_art_new_york_city

img_2837And here, at last, we return to our raven.

In this case, the carrion bird’s leaden wing falls upon a burnt and destroyed landscape. And yet it offers a bleak shred of hope.

Is the Raven mean?

No.

He offers a bleak promise of regeneration;  of the alchemy that comes when he feeds on rotting flesh and transmutes ruined matter into language and dark winged flight.

After the murdering has been had, the very sad truth is that there’s nothing more that can be done.  Nothing will bring back the dead.

The Romanian poet, Paul Celan survived the invasion of his country by the Soviets in 1940 and in 1941 the butchering of the Jews of Cernauti by the German Einsatzkommando.  In his poem Todefuge, he would later write

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken
wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling, he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us to play up for the dance.

img_2813Yes, we can and should try to stop it.  I would really like for the ravens to join with the lambs.  And in a sense they do.  They fly ahead of the advancing armies and their squawk fills the air as if to say, “Please. Listen.  Bad things are afoot.  Fight or flee, the days are numbered.”

And if there’s no listening, then the birds are left only to bear witness.

 

 

 

img_2841In Keifer’s Sulamith, the artist leads us to the entrance of the Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers.  But this hall, designed by the Nazi architect Wilhelm Kreis and intended to commemorate the perpetrator, under Kiefer’s hand instead transmutes into the terminus of the iron track and the burning flames of the oven.

We find ourselves descending into hell.

“What would you do in this moment? Would you turn away from something so dark?  Or would you intercede? Would you have the strength to gaze deeper and to feel it?”

Kiefer’s expressionism and experimentation of form is neither decadent nor abstract, but rather cemented in an amorality and horror unlike any the world has ever seen. Even more disturbing, it emerged in the very cradle of modernity, in a technologically advanced Western democracy not dissimilar from our own.

img_2818A Holocaust is not necessarily savagery in a some other savage place, but quite the opposite: savagery wrought by us. Richter perhaps challenges us to detect the darkness and violence inherent in the seemingly placid sea.

To experience Kiefer and Richter, one can learn from a generation forced to ask where their parents or even they themselves were when these things happened.  How could they stand by and tacitly allow others to be hurt?   What did they fear?  What did they have to gain?  How did they not see it coming?  How did they come to believe the propaganda?

Where do you find yourself in the picture?

—
When presented with Gerhard Richter’s Lesende (The Reader), the German writer Luisa Beck asks who is this girl?  And what does she have to offer?

Beck’s answer?  She is a German. And she is us. And the look on her face betrays something important. That inhumanity can be born from and live commensurate with normalcy.  As with our relationship to the raven, if ungood comes to pass and if we survive it, what will be our relationship to this girl?  If we ourselves become war borne, how will we reconcile our own inhumanity with this profile and with this face, so lovely and so hardened?

img_2804

And This is Why

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Today I sit in a coffee bar in San Francisco. It’s evening in the Lower Haight.

Today I turn 52.

History’s anodyne gaze renders all things banal. To the future: this is what the face of imminent horror may look like.

Today, on this day, leak sources reveal that the administration was in communication with Russian intelligence for months before the election.

This week, a spokesman for the President stated that the powers of the President are substantial and are not to be questioned.

The President himself accuses those who leak information of being guilty of treason.

In a news conference he refuses to take questions from established media sources. He categorizes Palestinians as hateful violent people. He threatens darkly that we will crack down on criminal elements and make America great again.

He accuses anybody who speaks against him as being a purveyor of fake news.

On this day I turn 52.

—-

I was 17 when my mom turned 52. Alone and long widowed, in that moment she thought that her life was over.

A few years earlier she had told me that she would kill herself on my 18th birthday, because then her filial and parental duties would be over.

As events would have it, she wasn’t too far off her mark.

But she’d crumbled long before that. The mother I’d known since I was six or seven would sleep most of the day. She would not cook or clean house. For many days or weeks growing up, she would simply be gone. My brother and I would fend for ourselves as best we could.

It was the only life I knew. And I never thought to ask why it was or if perhaps it could have been any different.

It took years of maturation before I would have the wherewithal to even seek an explanation. What could have possibly left a once brilliant and vivacious woman, so disabled and so damaged that at such a young age she could imagine no future for herself?

It’s taken a lot of excavation over a lot of years to find the answers.

In 1989 I sat in a nursing home with the shell of that poor woman. Her skull was indented from a frontal lobotomy. She didn’t have many words then. She sat in a breezeway in a nursing home, a Time magazine in her lap, the cover showing bodies in Tainanmen Square. I found her crying and I asked what was the matter. Because this happened in my country, she said.

It took a quarter of a century for me to learn something of what she meant. She was a war child. She was born in 1930 and the only conscious life she knew until she was 20 was under the dark shadow of authoritarianism.

The man in the White House talks about carnage in America. But he does not know carnage. And I fear that the true carnage may be the one which he and his cohort threaten in word and deed to bring upon us.

Carnage is the tactical unleashing of the fear of the other, of declarations that we must be afraid and that we are under threat of terror.

Carnage is the disintegration and dismemberment of civic institutions.

Carnage is the consenting transfer of power from the body politic to a small cadre of individuals.

Carnage is to have your neighbors, and inexorably you yourself, declared an enemy.

Carnage is to declare war in order to consolidate power over a people.

Carnage is having your childhood playmates and their families loaded in trucks and then onto trains and then carried away to points eastward.

Carnage is having 143 men, women, and children – residents of your village – receive dispensation with a bullet to the head.

Carnage is eating bread baked of sawdust and straw.

Carnage is to know insufferable cold and hunger.

Carnage is to smell for months on end the toxic stench of rotting flesh and burning rubber and powder and fire.

Carnage is seeing the bloated bodies of deserters hanging in trees because they were traitors.

Carnage is to have no home to which you may return; having no country for to call your own.

Carnage then, is to experience such loss, that you for the remainder of your life can see no future and you become paralyzed by the very processes of living.

—-

The lived experience of that carnage, if not the memory itself, is passed on to the descendent. You find yourself risk averse. Or perhaps strangely paralyzed when it comes to the most basic decisions – even the most petty can result in life or death. You question the reliability and certitude of all things – relationships or even the persistence of our own democracy.

You grow up hungry, and you learn to double or triple down when food is presented. You look for brake lights, not just in the car in front, but three cars ahead. You bolt at explosions and loud noises. You awaken in the middle of the night with an undefinable dread.

And even when the administration appears to be in chaos and in threat of toppling, you know better.  You know that the deranged beast, when wounded, is in fact the most dangerous.  And that it will unleash a fury with which there is no reckoning, that we will be at war within months.

I asked folks on Facebook this morning to read and perhaps share the following interview of historian Timothy Snyder. It suggests only obliquely the surreal horrors that my mother and her generation knew. And here, now, 75 years distant from those shadows, I feel we are not safe, that the demons will yet be visited upon us.

Perhaps more than anything else, the circumstances and events described by Timothy Snyder give shape to who I am today.

And this is why, for your pleasure or perhaps only my own, I want people to read what he has to say, today, on the day that I turn 52.

Today, on this day, I don’t want the horror and grave sadness lived by the woman who brought me into this world to have been for naught and vain.

Today I can brook no quarter with this administration and the currents which they are stirring.

Not on my watch.

latvija-1930s-19a

Gratitude

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These are the things for which I am grateful today.

I am grateful that I have a home and that I am warm.

I am grateful that I have Facebook friends who could laugh at me and cheer me on yesterday as I crawled home with an injured back.

I am grateful for a long suffering partner who brought me a cup of hot chocolate this afternoon.

I am separately grateful for the milk and for the chocolate.

I am grateful for my daughter who hung a Santa Rosa marathon medallion around my neck as I lay immobile on the floor.

I am grateful to have two pillows to tuck between my knees and one behind my head.

I am grateful to have windows that allow me to see the fog and the sunlight and tonight’s epic moon.

I am grateful to Kaiser Permanente for their excellent back care videos.

I am grateful to have hot water and to have a shower with walls so that I can stand and brace myself.

I am grateful to have high speed internet so that while I’ve lay prone, I’ve been able watch no small number of documentaries about the European theatre in World War II.

I am grateful to the persons who perhaps without any foresight of the future shot film and took pictures and wrote words so that three quarters of a century later we have evidence of all the things great and terrible that occurred.

I am grateful to have guidance for what may come.

I am grateful to the mathematicians of Bletchley Park who broke and broke again the Enigma code so that we could keep open the American maritime supply lines to Britain.

I’m grateful to Alan Turing for imagining the impossible.

I am grateful to the ruthless Germans who invaded my mother’s country.  If it were not for them, I would not be here today.

I am grateful to the ruthless Soviet troops who brought an end to the Third Reich and in the process chased my family all the way to the Elbe.  If it were not for them I would not be here today.

 

I am grateful to each and every one of the boys who fell from the sky on the dawn of June 6th, 1944 across the hedgerows of the Cotentin Penninsula.  If it were not for them, I would not be here today.

I am grateful for my thrown out back that gives me cause to be.  And the aching back that affords a moment to be grateful.

Trochenbrod

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trochenbrod 2In translation it means dry bread.

In the late summer of 1942, the Jewish ghetto was liquidated and the entire Jewish population of 3000 was murdered. Afterwards the village was set on fire. Less than 40 individuals survived.

Never in time will this place ever exist again.

 

 

Illumination

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die mauerBefore the Wall fell, Anna and I once took a train across East Germany and Poland from Berlin to Moscow. But to get on that train, we needed first to get past a Dutch-German Intourist agent, Hendrik Grave who, it seemed, was the only one who could book us a berth, but in Berlin something went terribly wrong, the reservations were not complete, the seats unavailable. We would have to delay. But no problem. We would stay with Hendrik, he said. But instead he put us up in a friend’s flat, but that friend stole our luggage and so we were forced to remain with Hendrik day after day, waiting for something to happen.

And always the patter of Hendrik, telling us about Die Mauer, about the twisted psychology of Berliners, of the unfolding of life and of self-understanding. Driving through the streets of Berlin, Hendrik would proclaim apropos of nothing and everything, “All ist gut, All ist klaar.” And always referring to himself in third person, Hendrik, he said, would take care of everything.

Over the days his story unwound. How his father had been part of the SS and had been a Reich officer. Of how as a boy during the war, he was told that his mother had died and he was sent off to live with a relative. He grew up without mother and father. Nazi exultation. The Reich’s collapse. Loneliness. And then as an older boy, a woman appears. She holds him carefully outside his home. People tell him that this is his mother.

But how could this be his mother? She is dead. She died during the war. This is not his mother. He pushes away and runs. The strange horrid woman was a ghost. And if not a ghost, then the adults around him were monsters for telling such a lie.

How had a war neutered a generation from it’s past? Who was Hendrik’s family and what deeds and lies had they all perpetrated, he would ask.

One afternoon sitting in Hendrik’s flat, the golden midsummer’s light casts his sharp features and white mane of hair in profile. He listens to Mozart’s Requiem.  Turning the volume to full, he drains a glass of white wine, head tilted back. All ist gut, Hendrik  says, eyes shut. All ist klaar.

Eriks Ievins 5.18.30 – 8.31.09

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Eriks

You were a crucible for memory now extinguished.

And you once said that one could only stand so much in a battleground, no matter who you were, before you were damaged.

You left Poland on January 22nd, 1945 in the late afternoon or evening. There was snow yet on the ground, minus 20 degrees Celsius. Your sister, my mother, sat in the wagon or was walking. You walked and drove the wagon all night long. At dawn’s light you stopped in an abandoned village and found food. You ate frozen bread and sausage from Gneisen. You stopped and rested the horses. It took 3 days and 4 nights to get to the Oder. All roads were clogged with soldiers and refugees, all of you fleeing Soviet artillery. The world itself was burning.

The air smelled like California, you said. You would later see it yourself when the flames tore through the chaparral in Pendleton. Smoke and fires and explosions.

In some way you muddled along hoping the bridges across the Oder would not be blown by the time you reached them. You crossed near Gistrien along with other refugees coming in from Prussia and others out of Poland.

Across the river, one of the Sulcs relatives pulled your father Julius aside. Well Julius, he said, you need to get out of range of the artillery and away from the river. Go south of the main road, the village will already be abandoned. On the road you had lossed Valja and Janis. Behind you, you had left your mother’s grave. Here though, you managed to get the horses in a barn and get yourself under some sort of roof. You had food, vegetable soup it was. And here, you found rest.

Thy portion is the goat: with heat consume him: let thy fierce
flame, thy glowing splendour, burn him.
With thine auspicious forms, O Jātavedas, bear this man to the
region of the pious.

The Sun receive thine eye, the wind thy spirit; go, as thy merit
is, to earth or heaven.
Go, if it be thy lot, unto the waters: go, make thy home in
plants with all thy members.

Away O Agni, to the Fathers, send him who, offered in thee,
goes with our oblations.
Wearing new life let him approach his offspring, and splendid, be
invested with body.

-from the Rigveda